Academics, Policymakers, and Research About Interstate Conflict
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Lost in Translation: Academics, Policymakers, and Research about Interstate Conflict Sarah Kreps Jessica Weeks Cornell University University of Wisconsin [email protected] [email protected] Paper prepared for presentation at the TRIP Strengthening the Links Conference January 14-16, 2015 Draft: please do not cite or circulate without permission. Introduction Policymakers have long lamented that the academy does not produce more policy-relevant scholarship. Paul Nitze, a high-level policymaker who later became President of Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced and International Studies, once categorically derided the academy’s contributions by saying that “most of what has been written and taught under the heading of ‘political science’ by Americans since World War II…has been of limited value, if not counterproductive as a guide to the conduct of actual policy” (quoted in Walt 2005, 24). In his analysis of the academic- policymaker gap, Walt quotes another policymaker who criticized scholarship as being “locked within the circle of esoteric scholarly discussion” (24). Perhaps most emblematic of academic shortcomings was that most theories failed to predict the end of the Cold War (Gaddis 1992), but the criticism that academic theories are inaccessible and of limited value has continued unabated (Kristof 2014). This chapter takes stock of those criticisms and poses several questions about the gap between policymakers and academics in understanding the causes of interstate war. Which theories, if any, do policymakers know about? Which theories do policymakers find most useful and influential? To what extent do the theories that are seen as either useful or influential reflect prevailing views in the academy? For IR scholars who want their research to affect real-world outcomes, knowing how policymakers currently learn about, and regard, academic scholarship is crucial. Only by understanding how ideas from the ivory tower currently make their way into the policy world can scholars learn how to maximize the likelihood that policymakers will incorporate academic research findings into their policy work in the future. To that end, we focus on understanding how policymakers’ views of important theories in international relations compare to the view from academia.1 It is important to note at the outset that one of the central challenges in answering questions of this type is how to gather the appropriate data. How do we know what “policymakers” and “academics” think about theories of international relations? There is obviously wide variation among individuals; our goal here is to attempt to reach some general, if preliminary, conclusions. For information on policymakers, we therefore draw on a unique survey of senior members of the United States national security establishment (the 2011 Teaching and Research in International Politics [TRIP] survey; Avey and Desch 2013). The survey allows us to examine policymaker knowledge of and attitudes about four main theoretical arguments/approaches: Huntington’s theory of the “clash of civilizations,” Waltzian realism, the democratic peace, and expected utility theory. To gather evidence about exposure to and attitudes about these theories among academics, we examine data such as citation counts, appearance on syllabi, TRIP faculty surveys, and our qualitative assessment of the view from academia. By comparing policymaker and academic perspectives on the same theories, we are able to shed light on our core question of how academics can increase exposure of their findings among practitioners. While there are obviously limitations to our empirical approach, we reach several tentative conclusions. First, we find that there are some significant gaps 1 This is related to, though slightly different from, Avey and Desch’s (2013) analytical approach of focusing solely on the views of policymakers; by comparing the views of policymakers and academics, we can learn how research has been disseminated historically in the two camps. 1 between academic evaluations of these four issues and policymakers’ exposure and perceptions. Second, we find that to the extent that policymakers are aware of theories, they do profess them to be useful for their work as policymakers. Third and relatedly, we find that the extent to which policymakers are attuned to academic scholarship and find it useful varies greatly by topic. Nitze’s categorical statement hides some nuance. Our analysis suggests that the largest academic-policymaker divide does not necessarily come from policymakers finding the theories they know about to be of little value, but rather from them a) not being exposed to theories that have received extensive attention in the literature and b) valuing theories that academics do not. For example, while the vast majority of policymakers are familiar with the “clash of civilizations” and many find it useful, academics appear to have largely discredited the argument and do not even assign it on their syllabi. The rest of the chapter proceeds as follows. First, we outline our methodological approach, focusing on how we evaluated policymaker views and compared them with views in the academy. Second, we turn to the evidence itself, discussing each of the four theoretical arguments/approaches for which we were able to gather systematic data. The last section concludes with implications and thoughts on follow-on research. Research Approach By necessity, our analysis builds on different types of evidence to evaluate policymaker views and prevailing views among international relations scholars. For evidence on policymaker views, we turn to the 2011 Teaching and Research in International Politics (TRIP) survey, a unique and innovative survey that queried senior members of the United States national security establishment. As Avey and Desch (2013, 229) describe in more detail, the respondents were members of the following departments or agencies: Defense, Homeland Security, State, CIA, National Security Council, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Respondents were asked about four main areas related to interstate relations: Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” Waltzian realism, democratic peace theory, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s expected utility approach. In particular, the survey prompted individuals about their familiarity with the particular argument, how they learned about the argument, and the degree to which they find it useful and influential. They also responded to questions about their educational background— whether they studied economics, international affairs, area studies, law, or public policy, as their highest degree, for example—and level of educational attainment. Our analysis of these data, which are to our knowledge the only data of their kind, comes with several caveats. The surveys were not conducted with the express goal of comparing policymakers’ views to those of academics, so in some cases there is not a perfect correspondence between the question wording and the underlying concept would we would like to measure. We therefore point out where and how specific question wordings could affect the conclusions that we draw. Having evaluated policymakers’ familiarity with theories of international relations, as well as how they learned about those theories and how they evaluated them, the next step was to establish how international relations scholars think about these same themes of interstate warfare. Ideally, the same questions asked of policymakers would have been asked of scholars, and perhaps those questions could be 2 incorporated into future TRIP surveys. In the absence of such comparable survey questions, we relied on three forms of evidence to establish how academics view the four main theories or approaches we consider. First, we offered a qualitative assessment of trends in international relations. For these assessments, we relied on our reading of the literature, conversations with colleagues, and by identifying major scholarly contributions that had either built on or critiqued the particular theories in question. Given that this is a necessarily subjective exercise, however, this cannot be the sole source of evidence. Therefore our second approach was to collect syllabi from the institutions listed as the top-20 for international relations in the most recent TRIP survey. We supplement our own syllabus data with data from an independent research effort by Jeff Colgan at Brown University, who in 2014 collected data on assigned readings for the core IR theory course for PhD students from 42 universities (Colgan 2014). Syllabi, according to Alker and Biersteker (1984, 128) are a “crude but useful indication in terms of contemporary teaching of international relations (including world politics).” To be sure, this measure has its weaknesses, as some instructors, including some whom we interviewed for this chapter, indicated that they include a particular topic such as realism simply because it was important historically and provides a useful foil for theories that they find more persuasive. Thus, syllabi may overstate academics’ views of the value of certain approaches since they were assigned as “conversation pieces” rather than examples of excellent or useful scholarship. We attempt to take these possibilities into account in our discussion of each of the four theories we examine. Third, we examined bibliographic data in the form of both Google Scholar and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Google Scholar accesses what